I don't think I need to convince anyone except RJ that intuition plays an important part in go, and my view is that he just doesn't want to be convinced for reasons of self-esteem or whatever. But to keep the pot bubbling here's an example.
It's a position from a new book that I've recently mentioned in another thread. Marcel mentioned that he'd looked at the book earlier and decided it was too kyu-ish for him, and looking at this position, which is typical of the book, you can see why. But what intrigued me about it was that I had no idea where Black should play now. In fact, you are seeing the hard version. I was looking at the easy version where author Kim Sujun presented two options to choose from. Even then I had no idea why one was better than the author. Of course I could rattle off a long list of factors that would influence an evaluation, and I could even rank many of them hierarchically. On top of that, I knew the book was about surrounding territory, so I had a billboard-sized helping of help! (And now you have it, too - and it's not a trick question.)
(;AB[qd][oc][pl][pn][pp]AW[np][nn][nl][dp][dd]SZ[19])
But my intuition told me there was something strange about this position, and - that's the point about intuition - I couldn't at that instant tell you why. As you can see, no dense reading will be involved, there are no dead groups or empty triangles. So where's the difficulty? Since this, too, was typical of the other positions I looked at when first riffling through the book, that was why I said most of this was knew to me. Although the penny dropped later, that assessment is still valid enough to make the book very interesting for me.
Before I continue, it would be good if you chose your own move here and decided which factor(s) dominated in your thinking. It would be fascinating if you shared your ideas here, too.
What I discovered once I got down to reading the text was this was an amateur game. That was my penny-dropping moment. That was when I realised why I was having trouble with this game, but it still didn't help me find the answer.
The explanation for my enlightenment is that I have transcribed thousands of games. Mark Hall transcribed much more. We both found (as have others who have transcribed many games) that practice makes perfect and we could normally build up a decent speed. Mark could do most games in about 20 minutes. I would take more like 30-40 minutes (and fall asleep after the first one - Mark would do five before breakfast, just to get warmed up!)
But what we also found was that, when we did a game that included one or two amateurs - even good ones, e.g. at the World Ama - our speed fell dramatically. Close to double the time was needed. We talked about this many times and were quite clear about the explanation. When doing a pro game we had a reliable
intuitive feel for where the next move would be. That meant finding the move on a dense diagram was not specially hard - we knew where to focus. The only real problems came when ko threats were scattered round the board (or, of course, as quite often happens, if moves are missing from the printed source). In amateur games, however, moves just followed each other without any rhyme or reason apparent to us, so we had to waste time laboriously scanning the whole board, over and over again.
Our conclusion was that we had both developed a good feel for pro play. This does not mean, of course, that we could read like pros or explain exactly what the pro was thinking. In fact we didn't know ourselves what was enabling us to focus so often and almost unerringly on the next area of play. The only logical inference, supported by many other things such as the repeated advice of pros to play over pro games, was that we had played over enough games to train (but unwittingly, without any conscious study-type thoughts at the time) our sub-conscious into acting like a reasonably reliable machine. For pro games. Pro games only.
Now at this point I need to bring in another element. You may say that we should be able to look any position objectively and make an evaluation irrespective of whether it was pro or ama. Indeed, Mark and I often used to tease each other at our weekly meetings with weird positions we had come across in the previous week, and ask the other to say whether it was from a pro game or amateur game. Our scores on these tests was no better than random guessing. Same for the position above. Why? Well, I don't know the full answer to that, but in his book on positional evaluation where he recommends not counting, Kataoka Satoshi (yes, I know he's only a 9-dan Japanese pro, Robert, but still...). To be precise, he says the following: 形勢判断は細かく地を計算する必要がありません。石の流れや石の形などから簡単に判断できるのです。(Exact counting is not necessary to evaluate a position. It is possible to do an evaluation in a simple manner on the basis of the flow of stones, the shapes of groups, and the like.)
He stresses that it is important to follow the flow of stones, by playing over the game, in order to get a feel for the position. For that reason he adopts the unusual approach of giving, in an appendix, the complete game record for every position discussed in the book.
It seems quite clear to me that it was indeed the flow of stones that was helping Mark and me absorb a wealth of signals (of which we remained blissfully unaware) which translated into sharp focus. You may interject that most moves tend to be in the vicinity of the last move, so of course we could often make a good guess where the next one would be. But I can assure you that we were both more precise than that and could very reliably follow all the tenukis (and, in line with having done many more games than me, Mark was noticeably more reliable than me).
Going back to the position above, I'm sure we can all see straightaway that White's high approach on the lower side is unusual. But is it New Fuseki, is it Gan Siyang? In fact, the GoGoD database tells us that no pro has ever played that move, even though there is a rather wide range of moves have been tried for White 6 (nineteen). The vast bulk of over 1,000 games up to Black 5 have White playing on the right side next, so you may say "wrong direction of play" for the White 6 in the game above, if you try to pin a principle label on it. But around 30 pros did play on the lower right side (only, they chose the low approach) and many more played on the left side or elsewhere. It is therefore something more subtle than can be reduced to an algorithmic procedure. In fact it's not even certain that the amateur move here is bad. All we can reliably say is that it's unusual.
I'll post Kataoka's explanation of the above position later. Suffice it to say that it was entirely convincing to me, in that everything he said tallied with something that was in my brain already. I "understood" him. But I don't think I'm ready to use that explanation yet to help me in my own games. For that, I need to play (or play over) lots of games that feature this "surrounding territory" aspect so that I can develop my intuition.
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